3. Marlowe Sarah Beckley
Manager, Content Strategy at SapientNitro
8 years in Content Strategy
5 years tech/web/print publishing
Specialize in hospitality, financial services,
online applications, content matrix development
Previous clients include Fortune 50 financial services
firms and some of the world’s largest companies.
@marlowebeckley
The Content Matrix: Deconstructed | CSA2014 3
4. SapientNitro
12,000
PASSIONATE
PEOPLE
30+
OFFICES
GLOBALLY
CONNECTED
24
YEARS OF
CUSTOMER
INNOVATION
1
COMPANY
2013 AGENCY REPORT:
# 1 Largest Digital Agency, US
# 4 Largest Digital Agency, Worldwide
# 2 Largest Agency Mobile Marketing, US
LEADER:
Gartner Magic Quadrant for Global
Digital Marketing Agencies
Forrester Wave™:
Global Commerce Service Providers
US Digital Agencies – Mobile Marketing
The Content Matrix: Deconstructed | CSA2014 4
8. 8
PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE
“The 19th century was defined by the
novel. The 20th by the cinema. The 21st
will be defined by the interface.”
- Lev Manovich
12. 12
CURATION IS “STEALING” YOUR CONTENT
Instapaper
Readability
Pocket
Pinterest
12
13. 13
INTERFACES ARE DIVERSIFIED
50 million people own tablets in the US.
Mobile use will exceed desktop use next year.
133.7 million people in the U.S. owned
smartphones (57% mobile market penetration)
during the three months ending in February 2013,
up 8 percent since November.
• Sources: comScore MobiLens & TabLens, U.S., 2003-2012, shapshop.com/2012-mobile-marketing-statistics,
ComScore 13
17. 17
THE FUTURE IS CHANGE
You never change things by fighting the existing
reality. To change something, build a new model
that makes the exiting model obsolete.
- Richard Buckminster Fuller
17
19. 19
THE NEW MODEL FOR CONTENT
Any recorded information. - Kevin Nichols
Human-consumable, contextualized data—aka the stuff
between the tags. - Rahel Bailie
Not limited to one purpose, technology or output.
Intelligent content is structurally rich and semantically
aware, and is therefore discoverable, reusable,
reconfigurable and adaptable. - Ann Rockley
All content is marketing content. - Bailie and Urbina
19
23. 23
STRATEGY
Content Strategy is the systematic, thoughtful
approach to surfacing the most relevant content at
the most opportune time, to the appropriate user,
for the purpose of achieving a company’s strategic
business objectives.
- Kevin Nichols and Anne Casson
23
25. 25
BBC OLYMPICS: ALL CONTENT,
EVERYWHERE
Sources: Olympics: User Experience and Design and2 5Sports Refresh: Dynamic Semantic Publishing, bbc.co.uk./blog
30. 30
STRUCTURE: WHAT’S OLD IS NEW AGAIN
XML was made official in 1997
Managing Enterprise Content 1st
edition published in 2002
Enterprise content management
became trendy in 2006
30
31. 31
POWERS FUTURE CONTENT
NPR famous for their content API
They are the ones to “beat”
Anil Dash and MindTouch both recommend building an
API first, UI second
31
33. 33
SCHEMAS MAP THE FUTURE
Content models
Metadata schema
Tagging strategy
Content ecosystems
Assign content type behaviors
Map content elements between content types
33
34. 34
SEMANTIC SCHEMA ARE WAITING FOR YOU
XML-Extensible Markup Language
DITA-Darwin Information Type Architecture
Microformats-Open data based on HTML5
OWL-Web Ontology Language
HTML5-Hypertext Markup language
RDF-Resource Description Framework
JSON-JavaScript Object Notation
34
36. 36
METADATA RESOURCES
Organization’s own content
Controlled vocabulary
Open vocabulary
Industry standards
Schema.org
Dublin Core
FOAF- Friend of a Friend (describes people and their
connections)
SIOC- Semantically-linked Online Communities
36
38. 38
REUSE: CONTENT IS PRECIOUS
“You can’t afford to create a piece of content for any one
platform. Instead of crafting a website, you have to put
more effort into crafting the different bits of an asset, so
they can be reused more effectively, so they can deliver
more value.”
- Nic Newman, BBC (via Karen McGrane)
38
39. 39
BUILD CONTENT WITH GEMS
But don’t hoard: Share
Create content once
Reuse, repurpose
39
Hubert Duprat, artist, interviewed by ecouterre.com
43. 43
RESPONSIVE OR ADAPTIVE
Omnichannel: plan for where the content will be shared
Responsive: content moves to fit the device parameters;
client-side adjusts pages
as a whole.
Adaptive: content-centric experience; server-side pushes
appropriate content elements based on device type and
features.
Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/garrett-goodman/adaptive-design_b_2344569.html
43
47. 47
OLD-FASHIONED TALKING PAVES THE WAY
Change management best practices
Marketing to the marketers
User testing/focus groups
Town halls
Communication plans
47
50. 50
RECOMMENDED READING
Managing Enterprise Content by Ann Rockley and Charles Cooper
“Enterprise Content Strategy: A Project Guide” by Kevin Nichols
“Nimble” by Razorfish/Rachel Lovinger
“Contents May have Shifted” by Erin Kissane (Contents magazine)
“Mobile Content Strategy and Why Should I Care?” Karolina Szczur
Content Strategy for Mobile by Karen McGrane
Content Everywhere by Sara Wachter-Boettcher
Content Strategy: Connecting the dots between business, brand, and
benefits by Rahel Anne Bailie and Noz Urbina
Mobile First by Luke Wroblewski
50
We must be feeling the pinch because we are reaching back to classic content and classic content models for inspiration. I want to share a couple of timey-wimey mashups.
I think the 21st century will be known as the century that we blew apart the interface and went back to the content. Here are a couple examples of what I’m talking about.
Lev Manovich is an author of books on new media theory, professor in Computer Science program at City University of New York, Graduate Center, U.S. and visiting professor European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Manovich research and teaching focuses on digital humanities, new media art and theory, and software studies[1] His best known book is The Language of New Media, which has been widely reviewed and translated into eight languages. According to two reviewers, this book offers "the first rigorous and far-reaching theorization of the subject"[2] and "it places new media within the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan".[3] Manovich's new book "Software Takes Command" will be published in 2013 by Continuum.
We’re currently reaching back into the past and mashing it up with current technology to forward thinking stories.
We must be feeling the pinch because we are reaching back to classic content and classic content models for inspiration. I want to share a couple of timey-wimey mashups.
I think the 21st century will be known as the century that we blew apart the interface and went back to the content. Here are a couple examples of what I’m talking about.
Lev Manovich is an author of books on new media theory, professor in Computer Science program at City University of New York, Graduate Center, U.S. and visiting professor European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Manovich research and teaching focuses on digital humanities, new media art and theory, and software studies[1] His best known book is The Language of New Media, which has been widely reviewed and translated into eight languages. According to two reviewers, this book offers "the first rigorous and far-reaching theorization of the subject"[2] and "it places new media within the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan".[3] Manovich's new book "Software Takes Command" will be published in 2013 by Continuum.
This is publishingisdead.com. People have been talking about the death of publishing for at least five years. What’s replacing it? DIY publishing. This website is a forum for independent writers to discuss how they get themselves published. Note: Music model died. Publishing model on life support. Traditional marketing arrangements are next.” – David C. Baker, marketing expert and publisher.
That being said, the publishing MODEL is becoming widespread throughout companies that never before considered themselves publishers. They are discovering the business value of their content and recognizing that thinking of themselves as publishers accomplishes more of their business goals. And is better for the content.
You could say publishing is dead, but in reality, it’s flipped. What was once corporate publishing is now DIY and product-based companies are becoming publishers. corporate publishing will take on a whole new meaning.
The home page is not the primary destination any more. People want to land ON the content directly from search. Mark Baker –every page is page one blog.
Who remembers when you told your clients that their important content had to be “above the fold”? We were taught that people didn’t scroll. Now, Pages are being replaced by streams of content that are all scrolling.
This is Facebook, a newspaper, and an app from the Red Cross. Pages don’t always make sense in this format. Between progressive disclosure, responsive design, and stripped down navigation, discrete pages as imagined on the desktop are vanishing. Robert Rose said on Monday Consumers EXPECT responsive and adaptive on mobile. Hulu, Pandora, Netflix, it’s all content you customize to your preferences. Under a certain age, anything that is not amative/responsive is dead to them.
Content is “shifting” (Sara Wachter-Boettcher’s term) out of your hands.
Consumers are able to pull almost any content from anywhere to view and organize in their own way. They are stripping out what they don’t want from your site to get at the golden nuggets! Btw, Pinterest referrals spend 70% more money than non-social referrals. http://www.viralblog.com/social-media/pinterest-statistics-users-interaction-and-engagement/
Whatever context your site provided or whatever user journey you may have mapped out may be stripped away. Your content has to stand alone.
About 40% of the US owns a smart phone (if I’m doing the math right, which is a big stretch.) We don’t know what the future will bring so we need to be as prepared as we can.
What do you want to get out of today?
With Google Glass, the user interface is a heads up display. These will be available to the public next year. Is your content?
Artificial intelligence is catching up.
We’re currently reaching back into the past and mashing it up with current technology to forward thinking stories.
When you are creating the content ecosystem, Recognize the organization’s mental model of content
Use your best change management and social skills to reset the mental model to adaptive content/intelligent content if it isn’t there yet
RBF: American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor, and futurist. Fuller published more than 30 books, inventing and popularizing terms such as "Spaceship Earth", ephemeralization, and synergetic. He also developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, including the widely known geodesic dome. Carbon molecules known as fullerenes were later named by scientists for their resemblance to geodesic spheres.
Buckminster Fuller was the second president of Mensa from 1974 to 1983.[2]
I agree with these and they are germane to our conversation today. You should be familiar with them all and do we have any disagreement/additions? (board)
Creating flexible, reusable content that is platform and device agnostic to support content that can adapt to the unknown.
These are some words used to describe content these days. Personally, if I found someone who was all of these things, I would marry them. “Content must be free to go where and when people want it most.” Lovinger, Nimble Content that’s trapped in a silo is basically invisible. If you love content, you will it free. The irony is that the more structured it is the more flexible it will be.
This should be your mantra. I’m going to go over these at a high level because there are whole books—print books some of them—(so publishing not quite so dead) on each of these topics.
Andrea and Alyson said that CS: is Defining the content that makes a difference in the market. You may inherit a strategy, a vision, a mission, ideally you are establishing your content strategy based on the ecosystem you have mapped and the discovery work you do.
A mix of text, video, gifs, interactive maps, and charts, Snow Fall is what the internet was supposed to be all the time.
Now you are asking, but what about BIG content? Massive content? Few things are larger than the Olympics and the BBC has at least two blog post, very detailed, on how they went about building their site, which included (among other things) a profile page for every single athlete and pages for every event.
Their vision was "Never miss a moment".
One post describes the UX process and the other describes the technology strategy used to evolve from a relational content model and static publishing framework towards a fully dynamic semantic publishing (DSP) architecture. I highly recommend that you read this as it’s much too much info for the time we have, but both articles are great.
Basically, they came up with highly evolved ontologies and tagging strategies. They only surfaced the simple version to the authors so they would not be overwhelmed. This leads us into a discussion of the future!
This is an example to show you how extensive and rigid a governance model can be. Outside of the government, it’s the best one I could find. Your organization is probably not at this level. But you need to understand what governance is all talk and which is real in your ecosystem. For example, pot roast story. What is done out of routine vs. need can layer up.
structured content has been around for 100 internet years. However, not everyone is riding the bus!
Before even getting into the "front end" design challenge, "publishers need to sort out their 'back end' content management systems, and moreover their API, to give them a standard way to work with their content." Only with a strong CMS and API can publishers actually arrange their content into multiple layouts for optimal consumption across a range of devices.
Baptiste Benezet, CEO at French mobile development firm Applidium,
A schema is Organized knowledge about the content and what happens in it.
tagged content is the building materials and schema is the blueprint.
Needs to be able to incorporate new content types within reason and be enforceable.
Model should be flexible enough to handle new content types
Val Swisher of Content Rules recently compared structured content to a closet. You have a place for everything. Mark Baker followed up with the fact that you can’t scale a closet. It works as a metaphor, but in terms of implementation, you need more. However, The ability to place an object near to an infinite number of other objects in an infinite number of dimensions of alikeness is one of the fundamental properties of digital computers that makes them so powerful for managing information. Mark Baker, Every Page is Page One.
Rachel Lovinger is extremely vocal about semantics and linking data. And I have to agree with her. The most important to know is that it’s going to take serious time and effort to get good semantic metadata. Source: “Content Access: Maximizing Availability Across the Enterprise”, AIIM Whitepaper 2012, www.aiim.org says that 40% of respondents put metadata and taxonomies as their biggest issue around tying content to process.
Dan Willis: Traditional publishing and CMSs bind content to display and delivery mechanisms which forces a recycling approach for multi-platform publishing.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0031320310002682
Here’s an example of semantic tagging being used for pattern recognition for search. This is vis SciVerse.j
Schema.org is a collection of frameworks developed by Google, Bing and Yahoo. Dublin Core is a set of “core” attributes that can be used for just about anything, RDF is non-hierarchical metadata schema.
There are many more industry specific metadata sources. Just Google around or ask others in your industry what they use.
Trigger warning—if you can’t look at pictures of bugs, close your eyes for this one.
A French artist provides only gold nuggets and gems for these caddy flies to use for their shells. I love this image for several reasons. 1. if you start with the best—only the gold and gems, then whatever you build is going to be beautiful. 2. these can only be built because the components are small. 3. it’s delightful.
How many of you know what this is?
Coco-cola can’t change their formula but content is more flexible. Last year, two guys took some 200 year old content and turned it into 100 five-minute YouTube videos. They got a million hits and the Kickstarter to turn it into DVDs was funded at 770% over budget.
The Lizzie Bennet Diaries take Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and turn it into video blog posts. There are spin off videos by three other characters, one of which is actually a company. They spoofed a TechCrunch post about the debut of a new app. Each character has a Twitter account and there’s a website, a FB page, and a Tumblr feed. Not including the fan websites. And There’s a subreddit and merchandise. there’s parody videos. And they are going to do it again.
Content is getting smaller. This is Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear’s P45 CAR that he designed himself. blogger Anil Dash[2] in 2002:
"TA day's weather forecast [sic], the arrival and departure times for an airplane flight, an abstract from a long publication, or a single instant message can all be examples of microcontent.“ A tweet, a video, a text—all microcontent.
Smaller your content the more flexible it can be and if you are writing for reuse, which you should be, then you may be starting from long form and creating several different sizes of content elements at the same time. It’s cheaper and easier to do it together than to go back and revisit the content multiple times.
We have no idea what mobile platforms are going to look like in a few years—who knew that the market leader Palm would drop to 4% market share and that their replacement, Blackberry would soon follow the path of eroding market share.
Make every word count.
The Palm Pilot is dead
The Blackberry is dying
Apple is showing signs of wearing thin
We don’t know what devices are coming
Content lifecycles can be so long in large orgs that you need a buffer
Responsive means
These are a couple images of what Google Glass displays may look like. Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standard
A way of thinking about data
Design principles for formats
Adapted to current behaviors and usage patterns (“Pave the cow paths.”)
Highly correlated with semantic XHTML, AKA the real world semantics, AKA lowercase semantic web, AKA lossless XHTML
A set of simple open data format standards that many are actively developing and implementing for more/better structured blogging and web microcontent publishing in general.
I’m showing this graph because it paints a picture we’re all familiar with: IT is driving the content bus. If you haven’t experienced this, let me give you a couple examples. Recently I was helping an insurance company update a product and they needed all new FAQs and knowledge articles for customer service. In working with the team that had been identified to me as the product experts, I ran into a few problems 1. they refused to chunk the content. They could not understand why a phone rep would need shorter articles—phone reps who were also supposed to use chat and email as well. And when I told them that we were bringing in additional copywriters to help them, they said “what’s a copywriter?” turns out these people are called “tech analysts.” they were writing tons of content and no idea how to write reusable, scalable content.
I have also been told I had to collapse a 700 page website into 100 pages because that’s how many pages IT could validate for accessibility by the deadline.
You must run a marketing and education campaign about content to every key stakeholder in the company. You goal is a content champion from the C-suite or as high as possible.
How many of you know what this is?
Coco-cola can’t change their formula but content is more flexible. Last year, two guys took some 200 year old content and turned it into 100 five-minute YouTube videos. They got a million hits and the Kickstarter to turn it into DVDs was funded at 770% over budget.
The Lizzie Bennet Diaries take Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and turn it into video blog posts. There are spin off videos by three other characters, one of which is actually a company. They spoofed a TechCrunch post about the debut of a new app. Each character has a Twitter account and there’s a website, a FB page, and a Tumblr feed. Not including the fan websites. And There’s a subreddit and merchandise. there’s parody videos. And they are going to do it again.